Monday, February 16, 2015

Site Collection Consolidation

Site Collection consolidation is an interesting topic, and in my opinion one that bears some significant consideration before proceeding. Why this article? I recently worked with a client who wanted to consolidate from 50+ Site Collections to ~3. The reason, the number of site collections seemed unmanageable at that point. There was a only a single Content Database as well. So since then I've been putting more and more thought in to the issue. Here's some of the talking points:

Site Collections represent a monolithic security context, i.e. they do not inherit permissions from other objects.

One object may be that a Site Collection inherits the ability to provide anonymous access from the Web Application that surrounds it.

Site Collections inherit the authentication mechanism(s) defined by the Web App.

Neither of these are permissions, but rather mechanical 'illities that are granted to the Site Collection by it's parent Web App.

Content and Navigation:

With Publishing Infrastructure (SharePoint Enterprise), navigation can be auto-generated based on the Site-Subsite relationships

Automatic security trimming based user access

Publishing based navigation doesn't cross the Site Collection boundary

I'm not sure if this is good or bad. I'm usually building single tenant intranet sites, so this isn't a plus, but recently I've had a chance to work with a client who provides SharePoint sites to multiple tenants, and this feature is a plus.

SharePoint 2013 brought about pinned Managed Metadata for navigation.

Each site collection requires a copy of the pinned data, which can clutter the metadata tree.

Security Trimming doesn't occur here

Lists that refer to other lists only occur with in a single site collection.

Again more of a problem for a single tenant with lots of site collections, a requirement for one collection per tenant.

Controls that pull resources like XSLT from inside the SharePoint Web structure can't access content from other Site Collections.

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About Me

Matt has been developing software professionally for 25 years and started nearly 10 years before that. As part of a secret government program to train 11 year olds to hack, Matt started out on a brand-new Apple IIe, creating a database of G.I. Joe action figures and animating lo-rez graphics in Applesoft Basic.
Since then, Matt's moved on to OOA/OOD/OOP and is currently a distributed systems software architect and project manager.
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